Dreams are pretty weird. While I could give a personal spiel about this, I think Matthew Walker in his book Why We Sleep breaks it down pretty well. Here’s five reasons why sleep is weird.

First, we see things that aren’t actually there – we hallucinate. Second, we believe things that couldn’t possibly be true – we become delusional. Third, we become confused about time, place and person – we become disoriented. Fourth, we have extreme emotional swings – we become affectively labile (a psychiatric term). And fifth, we wake up in the morning and forget most, if not all of this bizarre dream experience – we suffer from amnesia. If you were to experience any of these symptoms while awake, you’d be seeking immediate psychological treatment. In other words, every night, we become flagrantly psychotic.

Over the past few decades, much research has been done on the nature of dreams. Through this research, scientists have generated some findings about sleep which seem to explain some of the strange presentations during dreaming. For instance, we know that four main clusters of the brain light up during sleep:

1. The visuospatial regions in the back of the brain, enabling visual perception;
2. The motor cortex, enabling movement;
3. The hippocampus and surrounding structures, supporting autobiographical memory;
4. The amygdala and cingulate cortex – both of which are heavily involved in generating emotion.

We also know that there is a pronounced deactivation of the far left and right sides of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain managing rational thought and logical decision-making. This explains why in my dreams, I think it’s a good idea to fight a dragon whilst naked when in reality, I might be wary of a little dog.

Despite all this research, some questions still remain: why do we dream and more interestingly, what do these dreams mean? I mean, surely there must be a productive reason for mother nature to allow this routine psychosis to occur every night, given how ludicrous it seems objectively. Of course, theories have been proposed aiming to address these questions. In his book The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Sigmund Freud proposed that dreams come from unconscious wishes that have not been fulfilled and that when dreaming, repressed desires reveal themselves in the form of “manifest content”. The task of Freud and other psychoanalysists was to ‘decode’ this disguise and reveal one’s true desires.

The notion of dreaming has notable representation in religion and mythology as well. In the Biblical book of Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar had dreams which turned out to be prophecies regarding his kingdom. This contention is shared by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, who regarded dreams as visitations from the gods, offering divine information. There are certainly no lack of propositions aiming to tackle these questions: a simple Google search of “what do my dreams mean?” is a wild ride.

In the more scientific realm, explanations regarding the reason for dreams include the repair of emotional and mental health, as well as honing qualities of problem solving and creativity, the latter seeming to be in the domain of lucid dreaming *. But while an impressive amount of research has been done as to what happens during REM dreaming (neurotransmitters, cortical regions and the like), the question of the meaning of dreams seems to remain in the esoteric. What exactly does my dream last night of being a primary school student in Brazil mean? Why is there a constant theme of water in my dreams? And most puzzling personally, why and how do some events from my dreams end up manifesting themselves in reality?

Perhaps one day, science will progress to a period where these questions can be answered. But for now, dreams remain curious things we might ponder about for a brief moment when we wake, until we lose its contents to our psychotic, amnesic selves.

* If you’re interested in learning more about this, I’d highly recommend Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep.